Serving Sizes Anyway You Want Them with GrubBase
Here at GrubBase, there’s no shortage in things we find frustrating about traditional calorie counting apps — after all, we got into this business for a reason — but, if we had to make a list of these frustrations, the way in which these other apps handle serving sizes would be at the top of that list.
Let’s take an example from a leading calorie counting app, we’ll call it MyNutritionFriend. Suppose you want to log a banana. Here’s what you would see:
Right off the bat, you might notice a few things that seem strange about these serving sizes. Firstly, you’re presented with an option to eat 1 container of banana, which funnily enough, only consists of half a banana. I’ve eaten a lot of bananas in my day but I’ve never eaten a container of bananas, so I’m going to explore my other options.
At closer glance, however, all of my other options appear to be the same option. I can choose 1 banana. Or I can select 118 g of banana, which appears to be the weight of the only banana MyNutritionFriend has ever encountered (and split across 2 containers no less!). Or, lastly, I can log just a single gram of banana, because either I’m a really light eater or because I have nothing better to do with my afternoon than logging the same food entry 118 times.
If you’ve ever used a calorie counting app, you’ve probably found yourself in a similar situation many times: trying to log a certain food, finding an incoherent and incomplete list of serving size options, and reluctantly picking one (probably throwing off your calorie count in the process).
Luckily, with the launch of GrubBase, there’s now a better way! The GrubBase team built a platform and a suite of tools to make it easy for you to log a banana or any other food, with whatever serving size your heart desires.
You’ll notice just like MyNutritionFriend, we still give you the option to log our old friend, the medium banana, clocking in at the same 105 calories. However, GrubBase also offers you the ability to log a large or small banana, because in our line of work, we encounter bananas of all shapes and sizes. You also have the ability to pick a serving size using just about any unit of measurement you can imagine, because we recognize that in real-life, you’ll encounter foods in a variety of different ways.
Building upon this foundation, we’ve enabled a number of powerful GrubBase features built to deliver where we view other apps as falling short, including:
- Easily converting between serving sizes (because it’s 2021 and apps should know how to convert grams to ounces)
- Factoring Add-ons (like Chicken Skin) into Calorie Counts
- Enabling Accurate Volume-Based Serving Sizes with Density Modifiers
- “Unit Weight” Serving Sizes
- The GrubBase Recipe Parser — where it all comes together
If flexible, easy-to-use serving sizes and serving size conversions sound like a breath of fresh air, sign up for a free GrubBase account today. And to learn more about other great features, check out our blog — the links in this article are a great place to start. We’ve put a lot of thought into this whole Meal Planning and Calorie Counting thing, so you don’t have to.
